AI software development line Engineer.ai raises over £29 million

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A UK-based startup using AI in tandem with a network of human developers to build software has raised over £29 million in funding.

Engineer.ai launched around two and a half years ago promising to combine AI with crowdsourced developer and designers to build products.

According to the company, their ‘Builder’ solution enables bespoke products to be created twice as fast and for less than a third of traditional software development costs.

Builder functions by getting people to work on a project when they’re not working on another gig from a network of over 31,000 developers and designers. The company promises human teams start within an hour, not days or weeks.

Sachin Dev Duggal, Founder of Engineer.ai, said:

“We created Engineer.ai so that everyone can build an idea without learning to code. This investment round validates our approach of making bespoke software effortless.

The capital comes at a time of rapid growth and will propel the platform into the mainstream, allowing Builder to open the door for entire categories of companies that could not consider it before.”

All costs are provided upfront to users along with a guaranteed timeline for completion. ‘Builder Care’ provides software updates, while ‘CloudOps’ deals with everything from analytics to paid services needed to keep software alive.

“Get all the services your project needs from analytics to paid microservices to AI-driven marketing in a single bill,” the company explains. “Always cheaper, always transparent, always in control.”

It’s an interesting model and one which appears to have excited investors. Today, Engineer.ai announced at Web Summit that it has raised one of Europe’s largest Series A investments at $29.5 million.

Engineer.ai received assistance from the UK Department for International Trade’s Global Entrepreneur Programme. Since its beginnings, the programme has generated over 5,000 jobs in the UK and raised over $1 billion of private investment for companies.

International Trade Secretary Dr Liam Fox MP said:

“The UK is known across the globe for cutting-edge innovation and our world-class tech companies. It is because of companies like Engineer.AI that last year the UK secured more tech venture capital investment than Germany, France, Spain and Ireland combined.

My international economic department is working hard to help firms go from startup to scale-up through initiatives like the Global Entrepreneur Programme which gives guidance to budding entrepreneurs around the world.

The programme has seen 900 entrepreneurs invest in the UK since 2005 – creating more than 5,000 high-quality jobs and raising more than £1bn in venture capital.”

Engineer.ai’s funding round was led by Lakestar and Jungle Ventures. SoftBank’s DeepCore also participated.

The company launched in June 2018 and is projected to pass the $100m revenue mark before the end of 2020.

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